Humans have five basic needs
by smaragdbird
Summary: Humans have five basic needs: food, water, shelter, sleep and love diverse pairings


Humans have five basic needs: food, water, shelter, sleep and love.

Food: The ship carried lots of different kinds of food: spices, bread, noodles, rice, vegetables, fruits, nuts, meat, fish and so on. They has enough food to feed eight people for seven years, or four people for 14 years or one for 56 years.

Water: to wash the clothes and themselves, to cool the mainframe, to water the plants in the oxygen room, to drink. They had other things to drink too: tea, coffee, juice, Cassie's weird instant ice tea, but mostly they drank water.

Shelter: Sometimes it was too much shelter. You couldn't just step outside for a moment and take a breath of fresh air. It took a few weeks for Cassie, Capa and Searle to get used to the constant movements of the ship. The rest of them had lived on a spaceship or –station before.

Sleep: Each of them had at least once wished that they would fall asleep and wake up when they had reached their destination. But things weren't as easy as that. They slept and worked in shifts but for the meals they were all awake.

Their sleeping quarters were the only, really private places they had. That had at least been the idea, but only Kaneda and Trey used them in this way. The rest of them had found other places: Corazon had her Earth garden, Cassie sat in the pilot seat on the Flight Deck, Searle stood in the Observation Room, Capa hid in his Payload, Harvey put his head in his noise erasing machine and Mace crawled trough the innards of Icarus.

Love

Kaneda's wife had died years ago. She had been a shop assistant, in a small supermarket around the corner of his apartment building, with a sunny smile and sensible shoes. They had wanted children but couldn't have them, so they had dropped the topic. Before his first mission after their wedding he bought her a cat, so that she wouldn't feel lonely. They had been married for nearly 14 years when she had died, caused by a heart weakness she had been born with.

Trey had had a girlfriend during college that had left him when he had gotten arrested. Then, after he began to work for the government, he went out with a colleague. That relationship held for three years, before they parted on good terms.

Preparing for the Icarus mission had been stressing and left him to random affairs when he had the time, but that was okay. He had never been one to settle down.

Searle had had his heart broken by an extremely beautiful, blonde, rich girl. He had been head over heels for her and miraclely she had returned his feelings. He had been young and foolish enough to believe that the relationship would last. But beautiful, rich girls didn't marry highly talented but middle class born medical students, no matter how promising their future looked.

During the last weeks of their relationship he and Claire had fought all the time and when she had broken up with him, he hadn't wanted to believe it.

He had behaved foolishly, had risked his reputation, his place at the university, everything to get her back. He had gotten arrested.

Without Felix he would not be where he was today. Felix had intervened, he had talked to Claire and made her move away to make the separation easier for Searle. He had endured Searle's moods for a whole year and never once snapped at him. Felix had made him take back his life as a student and as a friend.

It had taken years until Searle had understood why Felix, who had been his friend but not a particularly close friend, had done all this.

His relationship with Felix had been fundamentally different from what he had had with Claire. It had been based upon friendship and understanding not passion and untamed love.

Searle wasn't even too sure if he had ever loved Felix like Felix had loved him, but maybe it didn't matter.

He had broken up with Felix before he went on the mission. He didn't expect to come back and Felix deserved someone who would do all the things for him he had done for Searle.

Harvey was not particularly similar to Kaneda but for him, too there had been only one woman ever. He could not remember a time where Sharon hadn't been in his life. They were the same age and as children had lived door to door. Sharon was his first memory and his best friend, the constant in his life when his other friends had gone to other schools, other universities and other workplaces.

He could not remember a time when he hadn't loved Sharon. They had become a couple in high school and he had proposed to her on the night of their prom. They had married, had pushed each other through university. He had worked for the NASA, she had opened a café with her friends. They had laughed and cried and fought and made up but always only inches away from each other.

There were long separations when he had been away on missions, but he had promised her that he would always come back. Always.

Corazon had never given much thought about relationships. She had been happy with her work and with her friends. She had had relationships but there had never been deep or meaningful and the fact that's he had worked a few months in this lab or a year on this space station hadn't helped.

Until she had taken a job on the Luna II station.

Jonathan was considerably younger than her, 15 years, and so she had gently but firmly rebuffed his advances, which hadn't discouraged him the slightest. It had felt wrong. No one else had ever paid that much attention to her, to her favourites and dislikes, to her and her alone.

After she had left, Jonathan had resigned and followed her to Earth. In the end she had given in. it wasn't a decision she would ever regret. Jonathan shared her interest in classical Chinese music but could bring a plant to whither just by standing in a room with it. They could argue endlessly over Western vs. Eastern cuisine but the most amazing thing was that she didn't have to say anything for him to understand her and the other way round. They understood each other without a single word.

Seeing his face was enough for her to know that he missed her, that he brought her beloved plants to a friend so that they would still be alive when she would be back, that he loved her.

And seeing her face was enough for him, too.

Cassie had met James in her historical literature class in college. They had both studied it as minor, while her major was in Aerodynamics and his in MBA. She had been through a hard time after the breakup with her high school girlfriend and James had been the first one to make her laugh in a long time. That he was also charming, attractive and handsome hadn't hurt either. They had discussed Shakespeare over coffee and Homer over breakfast.

Then she had gotten accepted for the Icarus II mission and suddenly they only yelled at each other and icy silences had replaced Homer and Shakespeare. They had broken up a few weeks after he acceptance.

When Searle had told her that she was pregnant, she hadn't hesitated. Keeping the child was out of question. Searle had covered her back and she had gotten rid of the last thing that reminded her of James.

Capa hadn't been very lucky with relationships. In school he had had a crush on his lab partner Charleen, who ran away with is best friend Ian and came back when Ian had left her and the baby, but that was after Capa had left for university.

There he had met Mark, a tall, blue eyed blond math student with a passion for snowboarding that got him killed five months into their relationship.

At ISA Capa had been with Reed, pretty much the only colleague who didn't treat him like he was a child. Reed, however, had left Capa after three years to marry his college girlfriend he had met a month ago after not seeing her for six years.

Mace had moved around a lot as child, which had made every friendship and relationship he had ever had in this time rather short lived.

His first relationship had been with Scott, a blue eyed, nerdy guy who loved cars. Of course it had only held as long until his family had to move away again. His parents, too busy to notice his broken heart, had left it more or less in the hands of his twin sister to nurse him through his first heart ache. He had repaid that favour when her astrophysics boyfriend had left her at the end of her fourth college year. Then his sister had met an obnoxiously rich guy and started to smile again and Mace had begun his first long term relationship by dumping the contents of his tray on Warren's lap. Warren had the same beautiful blue eyes as Scott and at least as much commitment issues as Mace thanks to his abusive father. Three years later they had parted but they were still friends.

Mace had gotten a job as a mechanic on a space station, where he had, despite warnings and better knowledge, started sleeping with Bobby. Bobby was tall, with blue eyes, a sunny smile that he smiled rarely and still mourning his boyfriend's death six years ago.

In the beginning in had hurt to hear 'John' and not his own name on Bobby's lips in the night, but at the end it had hurt as much to leave him again. But Mace had to go, he had only been a temporary replacement for the original engineer while she had been on maternity leave.

Back on Earth he discovered that his sister had broken up with her obnoxiously rich boyfriend, so he took a turn with that. Only that Ian was not older than him, but younger, just 22 and barely out of college and had the biggest and bluest eyes mace had ever seen. It hadn't worked out.

Between his application for the Icarus II mission, Jessica's marriage to Reed, who had suddenly turned up after six years and Ian leaving him for a doctor named Jack, Mace hadn't had the time to feel crushed.

Capa and Mace hadn't been able not fight with each other from day one. The rest of the crew had been amused first how the two of them couldn't stop pulling each other's pigtails, but it grew tiresome with the weeks passing by since nothing else happened between them.

Until Corazon and Searle very accidentally locked them both in the airlock.

Maybe the Icarus could provide lover after all.


End file.
